GPU-accelerated View Factor Calculation for Fast Thermal Simulations

Heat transfer is an ever-present physical process, ranging from room temperature control to thermal management in nuclear and space applications. Examples of this are: nuclear reactors, satellite thermal radiators and atmospheric re-entry. Radiative heat transfer is the only means by which heat energy can be transferred without a medium. Furthermore, it becomes the predominant heat transfer means at high temperatures. View factors are geometrical parameters that govern how much radiative energy can be transferred between two surfaces. Their fast and efficient computation can aid the research and development work-flow. A novel GPGPU application is presented to calculate the radiative view factors in the OpenFOAM® framework. The application is capable of calculating the view factors for two-dimensional and three-dimensional cases of variable complexities. The existing algorithm in the legacy framework was analysed and improved. The GPGPU code consists of two parts: ray tracing and view factor calculation. Ray tracing determines whether two surfaces can exchange radiative energy and view factor calculation returns the view factor between the two surfaces. Ray tracing benefits the most from GPU acceleration. The parallelization onto GPU of the calculation of the view factors produces another source of acceleration which is smaller than that of ray-tracing but still significant. The overall application is faster and good accuracy is reported against the legacy framework's solutions and the analytical results.

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